Beck
Rating: 4.5
The story follows five teenagers - and a score of people who are a part of their lives - through their faithful meeting that lead to forming of a band named Beck to the various milestones in their lives which they passed by following the road that many wish to take, few try and only a handful actually walk any meaningful distance on. Though presented as a story about a band, Beck is actually about growing up, being yourself and discovering your path in life. And of course, about music.
Powerful, emotional, entertaining, philosophical, uplifting, has love, has crime - you name it, Beck has it. A wonderful series that despite its seemingly primary focus on rock music would actually appeal to almost anyone. It's a genuine, honest story that only very occasionally feels contrived (which is why it loses half a point of the review score). Through the contrasting introduction to its culmination in the powerful ending, the flow of the story is smooth and it never loses its focus.
Beck neither preaches some kind of morality nor hides ugly stuff of life outside of the viewport. It's all there, in all its glory and dirt. But it's not a depressing story with a sad or tragic ending, rather it's the one with a bright outlook yet not seen through the pink glasses. It is fairly clean from anime cliches as well, but you will still find some common ones - nosebleeds, boys taking pictures of girls during PE, pissed off girls performing acts of violence that would normally result in major injuries, ridiculously demanding bosses in restaurants where some of characters work part-time - as well as less common ones such as older single muscular males flirting with young teachers (it reminds me of GTO even if it's not quite the same). But all these cliches are hardly worth a mention, despite that long sentence above.
Since the main focus of the show appears to be a story of a band - its life and its music, this would be an important topic to cover. I say appears, because I'd say the story is more about the lives of the people in and around the band rather than the band, but then since the band is the most important thing in their lives you might say those are equivalent. At any rate, this is only the second show that I've seen trying to focus on a struggle of a musician - the other beeing the wonderful Full Moon wo Sagashite. This is something that is very difficult to do right. See, while it may appear that a media like anime can be used to present any kind of story, no matter how impossible in real life - such as fantasy or science fiction - there are still some limits to what it can achieve. This is because while you may create a story about a singer, you cannot make it believable unless the actual music is exactly as the story requires at that point. Meaning, if the story calls for uninspired signing, you need to make it so that the listener feels queasy and has the urge to cover his or her ears, and if it calls for sensational, life changing heart touching singing - then it should force tears into listener's eyes. Obviously, while you can animate the end of the world on command, you cannot sing or compose the most powerful song in the world. This is because suspension of disbelief will work much better on something foreign such as end of the world or space battles - especially if there is already a precedent which acts as a reference to most people - than on something not only known but also intimate and as such unique to each person, such as appeal to emotions.
Beck also makes big deal out of speaking English. Quite a few of the characters are supposed to speak it fluently or semi-fluently. For a japanese anime show, the quality of language and accent are certainly considerably above the rest, but they still fall short of being realistic, save for a few cases. I am not sure if there were any actual native english speakers as voice actors - a few of the characters that only spoke english had sufficiently good accents that I couldn't tell with 100% certainty - but I'm guessing there weren't. Also, it was obvious that while great effort was done to make actual english feel real, there were still enough issues with it that you could easily tell that the script writer was not a native English speaker nor that one was consulted. A very good effort for japanese market but it won't fool even an ESL speaker like me. If I think more about it, the lack of perfection in accents would seem at least to me as less of a problem than the lack of authenticity of actual sentences being spoken (meaning broken grammar in worse cases or more subtle cases of unusual use of words and phrases that give out the origin of the dialogue).
Despite all that, the music actually is the focus of the show and is not just there to get the story going. Various issues such as learning to play an instrument, playing an instrument, composing songs, rehearsing and so on were in my opinion covered very competently - and that's not easy. Even harder - as already mentioned - was to show the progress in the quality of both individuals and the band as the whole as they keep gaining experience and skills. Unfortunately there were a few issues here, mostly in the beginning, where it was obvious that the lead's singing voice isn't quite on target yet it was praised as if it was. If you look at it in the way of "I see a potential here" then it works fine, but from my recollection a few cases called for already established voice quality and I didn't feel those were quite adequate. Regardless, I was willing to cut it some slack because as I mentioned this is by far the most difficult thing to do and something that you may not be able to achieve fully satisfactory at all. Even harder than performing at the quality required by story at that point - which can be reasonably well imitated if you have marvellous musicians that would on purpose play bad to a various degrees - is having many songs that differ in quality as required, and of which the best ones are really good songs that stand on their own in real-life. Obviously, you then need songs that are really good and something like that can't be composed on command. This is one of the things where you can't rely on suspension of disbelief and where anime is at no advantage compared to live-action shows. You have to deliver the goods or you will fail, miserably. That is why shows of this kind - unless biographical - are very rare. Considering Beck, they did a pretty good job overall - I am no expert in rock music though. I do think Full Moon wo Sagashite did a better job, but they also had a considerably easier job so the comparison isn't really fair.
There is so much more than just music to Beck, though. The large cast of characters, most of which are original shows many faces of life and is probably the best feature of the show. It is rare to find a show with genuine characters and this is one of the main reasons for why Beck is so good. The almost mandatory love story - in fact a love triangle or even quadrangle at some point, maybe not unusual for someone who stars in a rock band - is nice and sweet though the actual plot of it is fairly cliched. The behaviour of characters is not though, and that is why it works. It is really hard if not impossible to put a new twist on the first/teenage love in terms of plot. The only thing you can do is try to make the events that transpire feel real and characters genuince; if you do that, you will succeed. While not perfect, this part of the story felt good in Beck.
A show like this can't really have a definitive ending - unless it's sad or tragic or cheesy. The best one I could think of would involve the "10 years later" epilogue, but lots of people would strongly object to those because they rob them of their own interpretation of what happened next. However it may also leave you unsatisfied because while you can imagine what happened, you want some kind of insurance that that is what really happened. I'm afraid I am of the second kind, I kind of want to see the epilogue even if cheesy, though then you run the risk of it not matching your expectations and possibly ruining it for you. Epilogue that matches your expectations and is not cheesy would of course be perfect, but this is something that extremely rarely happens (good ending + good epilogue is far harder to achieve than just the good ending, which in itself is plenty rare achievement). In this respect, Beck did as good of a job as you could hope for - there was a powerful ending to one phase in the life of the band, followed by episode and a half of typing up loose ends and setting up the stage for the next phase of Beck. I personally could've been happier with a bit more definitive answers, but I suppose in real life they don't happen either so it's more of a wish fullfillment ("and they lived happily ever after"). I guess a fairy tale ending would not be appropriate for a show that felt this real.
Yet, I am not quite sure whether Beck deserves 4.5 rating or should it be slightly reduced to 4. That's because it has a few hard to swallow story contraptions, and unfortunately these are crucial to the plot and as such I found them definitely distracting. In the end, like some other shows, it got 4.5 more because of the "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" and the personal feeling I got from it. The problematic parts were believing that an american crime lord and his cronies would have no trouble operating rather daringly in Japan - never mind staying there for any considerable length of time, and never mind being african-american (from what I understand, they would really stand out in Japan so just walking around unnoticed would be hard enough in itself, let alone commiting serious crimes). I guess this was in the story primarily to give it the "rock" and "american" feel rather than of any real necessity. The other big problem is related to the culmination of the story itself - it looked impossible in practice even though possible in theory, and while some explanations given while it was actually happening did help in removing some of the improbability from the event, it still required suspension of disbelief in order to fully work and I just couldn't summon enough of it. However, the scene was very powerful regardless and the particular improbable event (actual attendance numbers of the audience) was actually not crucial or even important to the scene, even if it was very important to the plot of the story. So as I mentioned, the criminal-related part of the plot seemed to serve more as a spice rather than the meat of it. It did serve well as a spice at that, but it was also out of place, kind of like finding real wasabi in a regular japanese restaurant.
In summary, this is a kind of show that even people who don't watch anime would enjoy. I higly recommend it.